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U.S Unemployment By Education Level
- shasta 16y agoCorrelation is not causation, etc.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Symmetry 16y agoNo, but robust correlation implies causation somewhere nearby. It could be A->B, or B->A, or C->A and C->B, or something more complicated. This is where common sense and ability to propose mechanisms comes in and while I can easily see how less education could make someone less employable, I don't see how someone's current unemployment can change someone's past education attainment, for instance.
- shasta 16y agoI was attempting to make what I thought was a rather obvious caution (which is why I kept my post so terse), but since my above comment has been downvoted to hell[1] I guess I should explain. I was not speculating that unemployment changes education background. My common sense agrees with yours in this regard. What I was trying to remind everyone is that this data doesn't distinguish between "education makes you more employable" and "bright/hardworking/advantaged/<insert hidden variable here> people do better in school and at the work." [1] Why is the -4 display cap still in effect now that we can't see other people's scores?
- tokenadult 16y agoWhy is the -4 display cap still in effect now that we can't see other people's scores? I think because the current experiment of not showing comment karma scores (other than your own comment karma scores) is done with minimal changes to the existing code base. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515825 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515825 for more background on the current experiment.
- apl 16y ago> Correlation is not causation, etc. This certainly is a true and tested adage, but I've got a feeling that the correlation-backlash has gone too far in the other direction. Don't just repeat it without getting it. If substantiated through proposal of a suitable mechanism, correlation is solid corroboration of a causality-claim. More precisely, correlation most definitely never implies absence of causation.
- sukuriant 16y agoUpvoted because that is the most succint way I've read the response to that common retort in this entire thread.
- sp332 16y agoIs this normal? Or a recent development?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- angdis 16y agoNo, but I think it is an interesting counter-observation against those folks who have been saying that a college education "isn't worth it."
- cema 16y agoThis apparently refers to the people registered as unemployed (and who keep registering every week), versus people who do not get a regular paycheck. I am not sure if the latter statistics exists for the US.
- wilshire461 16y agothis also is only people aged 25 and over, not showing the tough job market for new college grads as well
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- sp332 16y agoWhat would that number be useful for? Anyway, you could just take the population of the US and subtract the "employed" number.
- knaak 16y agoDepends what you are looking for. Do you want the number of people without jobs (including children, retired, hospitalized, etc.) or the number of people capable of work but without?
- gnosis 16y agoAccording to http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm there are 239,146 people aged 16 and over in the US who are civilians and not in institutions (like prisons or hospitals), of which only 139,674 are employed. That leaves 99472 unemployed. Which is about a 42% unemployment rate.
- rayiner 16y agoThat's not a particularly useful statistic. How much of that 42% is kids 16-18 in high-school, people in college 18-22, people in grad school 22-25, the retired? In 2006, ~30 million people were enrolled in the final two years of HS, college, or graduate school: http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p20-559.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p20-559.pdf Adjusted for demographic trends, that's probably higher now. In 2009, about 12.9% of the population was over 65: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html Together that's roughly 70 million people who are mostly being counted in your "unemployed" figure that shouldn't be included. That's not even including women who don't work. There is still a delta of ~13% b/w male and female labor force participation rates. They're 122 million women age 16 and over in the US. That's probably another ~10m who shouldn't be included in your unemployed figure. The above estimates double-count: those enrolled in school who work, elderly who work, etc, but is much more realistic than your figure.
- tnorthcutt 16y agoI find it frustrating that those with an associate degree are counted with "some college". I'd be willing to bet the numbers are much better for people who completed an associate degree than for those who failed/dropped out of college.
- Duff 16y agoNot surprising. Decent jobs where a lack of high school or college education is acceptable don't really exist anymore, and we use the checkmark of high school/no high school or college/no college as a screening device. I saw a posting for my local city's parks department for a person who basically mows grass. Education requirements? High school diploma, associates degree preferred. The correlation/causation issue is that we assume that no jobs for folks out of high school equates to no "low skill" jobs.
- skidooer 16y agoIt seems to me that the real reason is that the attributes one posses to drive them through college are also valuable attributes in business success. Someone who has no interest in working hard to attain good grades in high school and therefore does not go to college is, generally speaking, someone who has no interest in working hard to get a good job. However, if you took one of those employed college grads and stripped them of their degree, I think we would find their success in business would remain unchanged. It is the person, not the degree, that leads to employment. Ultimately, we simply do not have enough information to reach any conclusions from the data.
- Symmetry 16y agoI really do wish we could find a way that was cheaper than college for what is, in these cases, essentially a personality/intelligence test.
- m-photonic 16y agoEmployers used to give out aptitude tests all the time, prior to the rise of disparate impact lawsuits. Who knows how much better we could have gotten at testing these sorts of things if colleges hadn't essentially been granted a monopoly on employment psychometrics.
- russell 16y agoI believe that it is actually illegal under federal law to require education/skill levels that exceed those necessary for the job. This is civil rights era legislation, because excessively high requirement were routinely used to exclude blacks from jobs.
- tokenadult 16y agoA story submitted in the last day or so http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2522135 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2522135 seems not to have had much discussion, perhaps because the submitter retitled the story, but the submitted story has a lot of good discussion on the value (or not) of attending college, and is worth thinking about in connection with the statistics submitted here.
- malkia 16y agoSo what would a contractor, or an actor, or someone not actor but from the entertainment industry report? Some of those folks are regularly without job for sometimes more than a month, until they are on to a new project...
- gburt 16y agoThey would probably report as self-employed, although unemployed is possible. Unemployment in government statistics is an economic-political term basically defined as "people who are able to work, who are actively looking for work and have been for the last 4 weeks" Its important that they are "actively" searching for work. This is generally (in most countries, including Canada and the United States) defined the same as it is in the relevant welfare codes: looking at job ads, submitting resumes, making physical effort to find a new job (albeit, the extent to which that effort is made is hard to measure)
- waterlesscloud 16y agoEntertainment industry people often collect unemployment between jobs, so my guess is they report as unemployed.
- bendmorris 16y agoIt's too bad they stop with Bachelor's - does the trend continue for people with graduate degrees?
- city41 16y agoOr does it get worse? Do they get written off as "over qualified"?
- al05 16y agoI.e The boss is feeling threatened excuse.
- mgcross 16y agoOr too much of a "flight risk" when a higher paying position elsewhere arises, wasting the employer's investment in training.
- buckwild 16y agomaybe "over specialized"
- sukuriant 16y agoover qualified is something people hear, too. Like a Ph.D. working for Starbucks. Their degree warrants a wage the company [won't] pay. They're "too good" for the alloted budget of a new employee.
- bengebre 16y agoThe BLS doesn't report the data monthly, but it does occasionally break out the unemployment rate for higher levels of education. http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm In short, yes, the trend continues.
- amurmann 16y agoToo bad the highest education level in the survey is "Bachelor or higher". I would have really liked to see the impact of having a Master or Phd. I wonder if an education level above Bachelor makes any difference in regard of unemployment or just for income. I am also curious how these numbers looked 30 or 40 years ago.
- bengebre 16y agoHere's the unemployment rate data by education level in chart form: http://www.deptofnumbers.com/unemployment/demographics/ http://www.deptofnumbers.com/unemployment/demographics/ It's interesting to observe the structural nature of these series. At no time (in the visible history of the chart) does the unemployment rate of a higher education level exceed the unemployment rate of a lower education level. Through recession, recovery and expansion, education looks to be a verifiably sound strategy for increasing your employment prospects. Also worth noting (from the original link) is that the labor participation rate (employed + active job seekers as a fraction of the population) is higher as education levels increase. You're more likely to be working or looking for work the more education you have. Lower education levels have greater rates of people not working and not looking for work.
- jeffdavis 16y ago"Through recession, recovery and expansion, education looks to be a verifiably sound strategy for increasing your employment prospects." That assumes a causal relationship. The chart only shows correlation.
- orijing 16y agoThis is the oldest, yet often useless, criticism in the world. Statisticians know that when they are observing correlations they don't have statistical evidence for causation. That requires you to take a step back, decide what other variables could cause something, and test for that. But here it's more than some vacuous claim to correlation. Do you get unemployed as a BA first, or do you get your BA? Econometrics is all about identifying causation in correlations in natural data (i.e. you can't run scientific experiments on people's lives, like telling random sample of people to go to college and others to not). Here, you just need intuition to realize that one thing consistently is a prerequisite to another, to realize that it's not just some statistical garbage. There are three possible models to explain the correlation: 1. Something influences both one's propensity to get more education (E) and not get laid off (L). 2. One's education determines one's propensity to not get laid off 3. One's propensity to not get laid off influences one's education. This is nonsense. In a Bayesian network, you can visualize 1. as features f0,...fi (say race, parents' income, etc) influencing both (E) and (L), with (E) also influencing (L) directly. 2. would be a set of features f0,...,fi influencing (E) but not (L), with (E) directly influencing (L). So to conclude, "This chart only shows correlation" is a useless comment to make unless accompanied by an analysis of the possible probabilistic models that the evidence supports.
- russell 16y agoWell, it sure sucks to be a high-school dropout. But the situation is much worse than the statistics show. They dont count people who are too discouraged to look for work, those who would take a job if one were realistically available. Also not counted are those who are working fewer hours than they want. Typically the unemployment statistics underestimate by a third. I surmise, but havent dug into it, that the under-counting is correlated with education: unemployment is probably double the BLS number for the dropouts. And for those under 25, it is over 50%. Apologies for the lack ok citations.
- fauigerzigerk 16y agoYou can see some of that in the participation rates.
- boh 16y agoAlso interesting: NY Times: The Jobless Rate for People Like You (2009) http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/economy/unemployment-lines.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/econo... Plots unemployment by race, education level, age and sex.